Complex Emergencies
The international community’s understanding of complex political, development and humanitarian emergencies has evolved over the past decade to include a number of intersecting elements: displaced populations, weak political and social institutions, fragile economies, challenging development environments, pervasive insecurity, disasters that reflect and exacerbate these conditions, and often – although not necessarily -- structural violence. The term “complex emergencies” is generally used to describe these intersecting conditions as part of analysis and in order to determine appropriate local and international responses to these phenomena. As our readings for this course will make clear, this is a concept that has arisen by the accumulation of experience, related to a group of practices that has not taken a final form, and is not always internally consistent. The topic of this seminar is therefore a problematic: how should we dissect complex emergencies, how can we understand their attributes, why are they important, and what can we learn about governance, politics and policy by studying them?
We will examine the many and changing meanings, iterations and dimensions of complex emergencies, and will focus on the conditions that create and typify them. We will pay special attention to the political environments that give rise to complex emergencies, those that allow them to continue, and the political and economic challenges and constraints that color responses to them. These include several cross cutting issues: crises of humanitarianism, the meanings of vulnerability, and the construct of disasters; problems of migration, displacement and citizenship; justice, rights and governance; intransigent political disputes; and political emergency powers in transitional governance environments. The latter will include questions of trusteeship and political successions; problems of statelessness and contested borders; the contexts for international assistance and crisis response; the complicated politics of relief and development, and in some instances, transitions toward peace; and the ways that pandemics and climate change do or do not fit into the trajectories of complex emergencies.
Our exploration of emergencies will span the globe. Initially – and in part to develop a common understanding of the vocabulary and concepts of complex emergencies -- we will use modern south Asia as the canvas for these explorations. South Asia was born and shaped through complex emergencies, and these continue to shape its state-building processes and regional development. (For these purposes, prior knowledge of the region is not required.) I expect projects to take other regions and/or international issues as their foci, as seems interesting and appropriate to the course. In all of our case studies, we will analyze the intersections of political, humanitarian and development crises, pairing our investigations of specific geographical cases with issues that affect sustained emergencies
Our seminar will focus on analysis in the context of policy. It is meant to expand our understandings of the factors that contribute to complexity and the relationships among the various elements of complex emergencies. We will examine problems that influence the making of policy and its efficacy, broadly conceived – local, national and international, and economy, polity and society -- as well as the consequences of policy choices for the persistence or resolution of emergencies.
This course is intended to be a collaborative endeavor, and will include collective projects as well as individual papers and memoranda. Class attendance is mandatory, as is the timely completion of all course reading, presentations and written assignments.
This class is cross-listed with GOV 390L (#38185). GOV is the home department.